From a house in Kentfield, California to a bookshop in Odessa, Alec Soth made I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, a book of portraits taken in the rooms where the sitters live, published by MACK.
A few years before this book, Alec Soth sat on a park bench in Helsinki, jetlagged and coming out of a meditation session, and felt the boundary between himself and everything else go soft. The worry that followed was professional: that the work had been "just promoting or reinforcing distance." He stopped photographing people for a year.
The return came with rules. For a project with Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco he met people one at a time, sometimes trading pictures, sometimes doing nothing much beyond "play and hang out." After photographing the choreographer Anna Halprin at her house, he decided to work only in the homes of his subjects, where the shelves and the countertops do the talking. He wanted to be invited. Earlier work, he has said, "wasn't taking these people into consideration. Or not enough consideration."
So the rooms carry as much weight as the faces. Anna sits in a bentwood chair in a house of glass and vines, photographed from outside so the garden lies over her like a second exposure. Galina faces a three-panel dressing mirror in black sequins, multiplied three times, framed studio portraits of her younger self propped on the tabletop below. Ute's Books is four violet shelves under a ceiling blown open by damp, the paperbacks packed tight enough to hold the wall together.
Peter Hujar runs underneath all of it. In Vince. New York, an old man's head fills one side of the frame completely out of focus while a framed Hujar nude behind him sits in perfect focus, the homage stated as a question about who is being looked at. The slant Hujar used for friends in bed comes back everywhere: in Nick. Los Angeles, a young man on a white fur throw seen through glass doors and a spray of bougainvillea, and in an older man on a green couch whose chest carries a full-rigged ship.
Two pictures arrive as diptychs, twin panels with a white gutter down the middle. One looks through the gaps in a bookcase at a woman working at a desk, the second panel shifting a few inches until the gap closes and she is gone. The other is a bookshop where the stock has come off the shelves and formed a slope across the floor, too wide for a single frame to hold. The gutter is the point. Looking takes two goes, and something falls between them.
The title is the last line of Wallace Stevens' "The Gray Room," a poem that spends its length cataloguing a woman's things before turning on her and admitting what it can hear. Soth's stated goal was to make photographs that were "loving, and affectionate, and tender," which sounds soft until you notice how much is withheld. The clutter is legible. The person is not, quite. That gap is the book.
